James Weldon Johnson’s Feminization of Biraciality 385 Twentieth-Century Literature 67, no. 4 December 2021 385 © 2021 Hofstra University DOI 10.1215/0041462X–9528800 James Weldon Johnson’s Feminization of Biraciality Rafael Walker L iterary scholars have consistently construed biracial fgures as instruments for exploring other matters than biraciality. This trend has persisted at least since 1945, when Penelope Bullock (1945: 80) observed that “authors generally utilized him [the mulatto] as an instrument for a cause.” Today, most scholars more or less follow Hazel Carby’s (1987: 89) lead, treating biraciality as a “vehicle for an exploration of the relationship between the races and, at the same time, an expression of the relationship between the races.” M. Giulia Fabi (2001: 4), for example, sees the mulatto as a means for “drawing attention to the fxity and constrictiveness” of the racial binary, a sentiment no less discernible in Samira Kawash’s (1997) earlier investigation of the color line or in Werner Sollors’s (1997) study, published in the same year, of what he calls “interracial literature.” 1 In an infuential essay on Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929), Deborah E. McDowell (1986) takes an alternate route, provocatively proposing that biraciality functions in Larsen’s novel as a means for examining same-sex desire. Notwithstanding the di ferences among these studies, all take up biraciality as a way to consider other concerns—an approach against which Anne Fleischmann (2000) and George Hutchinson (2001) have strongly cautioned. Admittedly, some texts lend themselves well to this tack, but, as I contend here, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) is not one of them. Indeed, in that novel, Johnson does something like the opposite of what McDowell describes Larsen as doing: he uses contemporary norms governing gender and sexuality to contemplate the position of mixed-race men in the United States. Johnson’s wish to take biracial experience seriously in its own right is signaled by his decision to frame the story as an autobiography. William L. Andrews (1990: xvi) has attributed this maneuver to Johnson’s marketing savvy: contrasting the lukewarm success of other